LAST -- Indian of Chester County - Kennett Square, PA
N 39° 52.341 W 075° 40.114
18S E 442824 N 4413803
The people of Chester County erected this marker in 1925 to their own "last" Indian, an old woman who died in the county poor house more than a century earlier.
Waymark Code: WMAHNJ
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Date Posted: 01/17/2011
Views: 9
Indian Hannah also went by the name Hannah Freeman. The historical sources do not indicate when or how she acquired that last name, but it indicates a familiarity with white society and a proud claim to autonomy and equality within it.
Hannah was born in 1730 or 1731 to Lenape parents who lived on the property of Quaker William Webb in Kennett Township [now Kennett Square] in Chester County. Her family, which also included a grandmother, two aunts, and two brothers, typically spent winters in their cabins on Webb's property and then moved during the summer months to sites near Brandywine Creek, where they fished and planted corn. As the surrounding area became more densely settled with colonists, the Indians were squeezed out of their summer encampments, and many moved farther inland to the Susquehanna Valley. Hannah's father did so, removing with some other Indians from the Brandywine Valley to Shamokin on the Susquehanna River, but her female relatives chose to stay. SOURCE
The marker reads:
The last of the Indians in Chester County was born in the vale about 300 yards to the east on the land of the protector of her people, the Quaker assemblyman William Webb. Her mother was Indian Sarah and her grandmother Indian Jane of the Unami group (their totem—the tortoise) of the Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians
The tablet marking the birthplace of Indiah Hannah (Mrs. Hannah Freeman), the last of the Lenni-Lenape Indians (or Delawares) in Chester county, was formally unveiled and dedicated with very appropriate and interesting exercises on Saturday afternoon, September 5, 1925, in the presence of an unusually large gathering of residents of this section and nearby. The tablet was erected under the auspices of the Pennsylvania State Historical Commission and the Chester County Historical Society. The boulder is a picturesque, water-worn stone, secured from the bed of old Pocopson creek, a western branch of the famous Brandywine. To this rock is attached an inscribed bronze tablet, designed by the architect, Paul. P. Cret, Philadelphia. This marker is located on the east side of the West Chester road, about 400 yards north of the site of the old Anvil Tavern, which stood on the old Nottingham Road of Colonial days, now the Baltimore Pike, on the Longwood Estate of Pierre S. DuPont, several miles east of Kennett Square. MEMORIAL TO INDIAN HANNAH from the Bulletin of the Chester County Historical Society, 1929 (p. 34)
Park on the side of the road.